The half-breed had reined in where two low bluffs afforded him a clear view of the route, waiting for his mount to gather wind and the stage to arrive.
He saw the attack, instinctively complimenting the leader on the tactics: it was superbly planned, simple and effective.
He watched the horse go down, and the stage topple over. For a moment he thought about chancing a run down the slope; then accepted the fact his gray horse would be exhausted at the end. And waited; watching.
He saw Stotter and Weisskopf killed.
Saw the man in the black frock coat emerge
from the upturned side of the coach to take an arrow in his eye,
and the drummer climb clear to run a few yards before he died and
decided to stay low.
Cal Backenhauser was tumbled over in a frightened ball, trying hard to fight clear of the bodies pressing him against the salt-filled interior of the concord as Cardeen pushed up through the now-vertical window and began firing.
Then he groaned as the gambler pitched back with the broken shaft of an arrow sticking out from his face.
Both eyes were wide open, but one was gone red where the arrow had struck and carried through to the brain. Cardeen was dead, blood spilling from the hollowed socket and his fingers still and stiff on the grip of his pistol.
Del Brown spewed a thin stream of fear-inspired vomit over the corpse and wriggled his body out through the window. He tossed his portmanteau out in front and picked it up as he hit the blood-stained salt. He began to run.
He was halfway up the side of the wash before the arrows hit him, arms lifted high and voice screaming a plea for mercy.
One shaft took him through the underside of his right arm, slicing through the muscle to drive clear and imbed in the material of the drummer’s suit. Brown dropped his portmanteau and fought to tug the arrow clear. Then three more hit him. The first went in where his neck joined his shoulders, twitching his head to the side as a thick plume of blood erupted from his mouth. The second landed in his back, throwing him forwards on his hands and knees so that the third landed heavily between his shoulder blades, driving in to pierce a lung and cut off the flow of blood from vital organs to the brain.
Brown gasped, his tongue protruding thick and bloody from his lips. Knife-With-Two-Sides rode in and planted a .45 caliber slug from the Colt’s Cavalry model he had taken from a dead soldier into the back of Del Brown’s skull.
The bone imploded. Brown’s face went down into the salt, the front releasing a huge spray of crimson-tinted matter that spread in a shallow crater under the man’s destroyed face.
The Apaches gathered around the stagecoach.
Backenhauser kneed Cardeen’s body away and peered out from the window.
His sketches had come loose from the luggage and the Indians were picking them up, staring at them.
He gulped as Knife-With-Two-Sides pointed the Colt at his face and said, ‘Who makes pictures?’
‘Me,’ said the artist. ‘I did.’
‘Good.’ The Mimbreño holstered his pistol so that he could jab a finger against a sketch of Azul. ‘You make picture for me. Strong power. If it works, I let you live. Come.’
Backenhauser climbed out of the coach, unpleasantly conscious of the sweat that was running down between his shoulder blades and over his face. He tried to hide it as he said:
‘Sure. I’ll come with you
and paint you.’ Then softer: ‘Where the hell are you,
Azul?’
Azul was watching, unwilling to risk his life against the odds.
He watched Backenhauser hauled up on a cut-loose stage horse and the dead men mutilated. Then he set to following the Apaches across the spread of flatlands that lead north from Paradise Valley.
The terrain was flat here, a long, dry spread that folded gently into the valley where the smooth landscape gave way to a long stretch of ravines and mesas. He complimented the Mimbreño leader on the sensible placement of his attack, and set to trailing him to his hide-out.
The ground from which he watched was high up, flanking the low spread of country that bled into Paradise Valley. A wall of low ridges that fell down in smooth folds to the bottom, empty of cover.
So he waited until the Indians were gone down the trail, watching them as they turned north into the broken country fronting the valley. Then he waited some more while day turned into night and a moon came up.
After that, he rode down to the stage and looked at the arrows sticking out from the bodies. Then he followed the trail to where the tracks got lost.
That was where an area of hard rock spread out in a wide fan over the sand. He skirted round until he decided the narrow canyon leading off to the north had to be the Mimbreños’ escape passage, and followed it through.
The canyon fed into a wide bowl of land that spread northwards in a gigantic fan. Just inside the entrance there were horse droppings, and beyond those, hoof-prints; faint, but still discernible to a trained eye. He followed the tracks, alternating his vision between the marks on the ground and the threat of hidden guns in the surrounding uplands.
After a while the land spread out, shading
to either side into darkness as the walls got higher and further
apart. He rode with his rifle cocked, all his senses tuned for the
suddenness of attack. The tracks led directly north, heading
towards the rim of the gigantic depression, where the far side
broke up into ravines and caves and gulleys.
Backenhauser climbed down from the stage horse and rubbed his aching thighs. He was barely in time to catch the bags the Apache threw at him.
‘Now you make picture of me.’ said Knife-With-Two-Sides. ‘A good picture. Strong.’
Backenhauser swallowed hard, hoping he could hold his fear in and avoid staining his pants.
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said. ‘But I need light.’
The Mimbreño pointed at the campfires. ‘Plenty light.’
‘Daylight,’ said the artist. ‘I need daylight to paint you properly. To paint you as you deserve.’
Knife-With-Two-Sides began to draw his pistol, but then an old man came forwards, white hair gathered in a mane that was interlaced with little pieces of bone and hung round with tiny skulls of birds and animals.
‘Light is better for true painting,’ he said. It is like a sand picture. If a man wants to see what he paints, then he must see all of his subject. No man can spread the sand right in the dark, and I suppose the same is true of the pinda-lick-oyi- artists.’
‘I will not argue with you, Cuervo,’ said Knife-With- Two-Sides. ‘You are the brujo. But I think this white man who draws pictures had better do his picture of me very soon, unless he wants to die tomorrow.’
The conversation had been in the language of the Apache, so Backenhauser understood nothing of what was said; only knew that his life had been saved by the incredibly ancient man with the beaded, skull-bedecked hair.
